Rossotron.com

Wake up with coffee -
Ross Goldberg’s a murderer?
Thanks, Google Alerts!

---

Well, technically, it’s attempted murder.  And technically, it’s a man named David Ross Goldberg, out of Culver City, California.  But Google Alerts was kind enough to notify me via my Ego Alert (a Google Alert for your own name) that this gentleman, with a moniker so similar to my own, and who ALSO is an engineer by trade, is currently on trial in British Columbia for the attempted murder of his ex-fiancée and her new husband.

What a story to wake up to with your morning coffee, huh?

The Victoria Times Colonist is all over this tale, with enough details out that I’m surprised that it isn’t already a made-for-TV movie.  It’s a simple enough story – boy meets girl online, boy falls in love with girl, boy travels internationally and gets engaged to girl, girl spends time with boy, girl spurns boy, girl marries another boy, first boy goes psycho and plots to kill girl and her new husband in cold blood, with an automatic handgun, shotgun, and materials for making explosives:

David Ross Goldberg, 38, is charged with trying to kill Tatcha Aroonjaratsang, 26, and her husband, Jeremy Stewart Walsh, 22, on Sept. 24, 2008, as well as possessing explosive materials.

Goldberg, an engineer, met Aroonjaratsang on the Internet in 2007 while she was living in Thailand and studying law, the Crown alleges. Goldberg travelled to meet her in Thailand and the two became engaged.

However, after Aroonjaratsang visited Goldberg in his hometown of Culver City, she broke off the engagement, Jensen said. In an email on March 18, 2008, she made it clear to Goldberg the relationship was over: “I rather to die, if I have to be with you all the rest of my life.”

The apparent turning point, according to the Crown, was a July 19, 2008, email to Goldberg in which Aroonjaratsang told him she had met Walsh, a Canadian, and that they had married in the spring of 2008.

“David, I am married and have my life as I want, with the best person whom I love him. So it’s no point for you to try and find me. I won’t never go anywhere with you. even you try to contact anyone, Nobody gonna tell you my personal information. I am adult and married. I own my life.”

Really, after a note like that, who wouldn’t go stalker-crazy and plan to travel up to her home in B.C. with a handgun and 50 rounds of ammo, a shotgun with 4 boxes of shells, a night-vision scope, fertilizer, stump-remover, and a police scanner?  I mean, she was basically taunting him, right? Right?

Luckily, the only one injured was David Ross Goldberg; while he and the new husband were on the ground wrestling over his handgun, the quick-thinking ex-fiancée pulled a folding knife from her husband’s pocket and incapacitated David Ross Goldberg by stabbing him with it several times.

The trial is going on right now, and is expected to conclude mid-February.  From everything I’ve seen the poor guy definitely seems to have some mental issues, so hopefully the judge’s ruling includes some treatment of some kind to try to help whatever’s wrong with him.

More importantly though – can all folks out there named Ross Goldberg please legally change their names BEFORE committing crimes that get them in the news?  It’s bad enough that you have to go through 1-2 pages of Google search results before coming on a single hit related to me without things like this diluting the search pool even further!  I mean really, have some respect for your fellow Ross Goldbergs and lay off the front-page stories, will you?

HIV & AIDS Information :: Stem cell transplant has cured HIV infection in ‘Berlin patient’, say doctors.

This is fantastic news, but the best part is, as far as I can see, these were NOT EMBRYONIC STEM CELLS, but adult stem cells from an adult donor’s bone marrow – the donor had a resistance to HIV because his CD4 cells lacked the CCR5 receptor, which is a necessary feature for HIV to infect immune system cells of the CD4 type.  Other donors exist, and as the article states, there’s the possibility that with more research, gene therapy efforts can exist that transform non-compliant stem cells into those kind resistant to HIV – saving much of the effort of finding matching donors and allowing a much larger percentage of those infected with HIV to benefit from such treatment.

I caught this video today, and immediately thought of Steve.  Once I was a chemistry geek, but unfortunately those days are long behind me, and now I don’t know that I could even balance a chemical equation without a set of scales and some help. (Har de har har)

Anyway, enjoy the video, even if you don’t remember the difference between an exothermic and endothermic reaction.

A little while ago, Twitter decided to get rid of “basic authentication” for all third party tools (i.e. login and passwords) and force them to use OAuth as a more secure and user-friendly means of using their service.  This event, affectionately known as the OAuthcalypse among the tech community, caused many people to throw their hands up in disgust as they realized that many of their scripts and tools would now be obsolete – that is, unless they spent time and effort revamping them to use OAuth.

Luckily, there’s a simpler solution for all those folks out there – using a website that handles the OAuth handshake for you lets you essentially proxy your Twitter calls through an authorized site, meaning you can hang on to your scripts and tools with minimal modifications.

The easiest solution I’ve found out there is SuperTweet.net.  Designed to transparently replace direct calls to Twitter, SimpleTweet does all the heavy lifting and has quite an extensive API to utilize.  Setup is relatively quick and painless (see details below) and for the most simple one-line tweeting solutions, just requires you replacing your Twitter password with your SuperTweet password, and changing the URL you hit to the SimpleTweet gateway URL.

An alternate solution, and one I’ve had only partial success with, is Elliot Kember’s Simple Auth Twitter.  Although it boasts an easier setup (basically, click one link and you’ve got everything set up for you), it appears to be more limited in what you can do on Twitter via the proxy, and requires you to change your format of your scripts to hit a custom URL for each status tweet.  Although it worked for me on unix-based systems, I could not get it to work via curl for Windows.

My recommendation, if you like to tweet from the command line or have a script/tool that needs to do so, is use SimpleTweet.net to replace your old basic authentication calls to Twitter.  It took me about 2 minutes to set up and edit my scripts to use this, and they’ve worked flawlessly since then.  Sure, there’s a third party in the loop now, but if the alternative is learning OAuth or giving up on my scripts entirely, I’ll happily take the quick & dirty solution and go about the rest of my day doing something more fun.

---

How to Set Up SuperTweet.net – Step by Step instructions

1) If you’re not already signed in, login into Twitter via the Twitter homepage with the account you want to use with SuperTweet’s API Proxy

2) Go to the SuperTweet.net homepage and click the “Sign in With Twitter” button to get to the Twitter authorization page

3) Click the “Allow” button to allow “MyAuth API Proxy by supertweet.net” access to your Twitter account.  This is the step where they’re setting up the OAuth handshake for you so you can use SuperTweet as a proxy without having to do OAuth yourself.

4) You’ll be returned to the SuperTweet site, with a page that shows the credentials that are set up for your account.  Right now, the account is Inactive because you have not set up a password.  Click the “Activate” link to set up a password.

4) On the next screen, enter the password you want to use with your command-line tools.  Note: They recommend NOT using your Twitter password here to add a little extra safety to your account.  Most command line tools are going to transmit this password in the clear, so it’s probably a good idea to use an alternate password.

5) You should now be returned to the credentials page, with a note next to your status saying your account is active.  Congratulations, you can now use SuperTweet as a proxy for your Twitter calls!

Here’s an example to get you started – if you want to tweet your status from the command line, use the following one-liner:

curl -u your_twitter_username_here:your_SuperTweet_password_here -d status="Status you want tweeted goes here" http://api.supertweet.net/1/statuses/update.xml

(Curl for Windows uses arguments slightly differently, but it’s similar enough that I think you can figure it out.)

The full list of API calls is available here. Lots of possibilities out there if you want to get more complex, but I think most people just want their script/tool to be able to tweet status info based on the outcome of their script, which is what I’ve listed above.

Hope this helps you out, letting you continue to use those scripts/tools you wrote and Twitter broke with their OAuthcalypse!

This is pretty funny. Safe for work, unless you have prohibitions in the workplace about spitting coffee out onto your keyboard/monitor.

If Jews ran CNN… (via This Blog Is Full Of Crap).

Some excerpts:

• For Passover, they’d hide the liberal bias in the studio and let the kids search for it.
• Instead of losing money, it would be profitable. But not too much. It doesn’t want to show off. It makes enough to live on, and it’s thankful for that.
• After years on television, they’d have made a movie by now, or at least opened on Broadway.

With the news yesterday that company VideoEgg is buying and absorbing SixApart into a new tech advertising firm called SAY Media, there is concern that their new focus on advertising and the business user will lead to alienation and exile of the “fun bloggers” who use their TypePad and MovableType products.

Although there’s nothing out there right now about how long SAY Media plans to continue to support their TypePad product for regular users, they have already made statements to the effect that they plan to lose some of the blogging community to WordPress over their business moves.

If I were a TypePad user right now, I’d start considering moving to another platform (or at least have a backup planned) in case they pull another “Vox Eviction” over on TypePad. It can’t hurt to have a backup elsewhere, and now’s the time to do it.

Exporting from TypePad to another platform is difficult. With tools already in place to export from Vox to WordPress, Posterous, and Blogger, I’d highly recommend anyone who only exported to TypePad consider also exporting to one of these other blogging platforms. Even if you don’t use your backup right now, it will be good to have on-hand if SAY Media gives TypePad users the old heave-ho in a few months, when it “turns out” that hosting bloggers doesn’t fit into the new advertising business model.

As for SAY media – I don’t see this as a good move for either company.  Yes, there is a lot of money to be made in advertising out there, but I don’t know that either infrastructure is going to provide enough leverage to give them an edge over one of the existing advertising consortiums out there (i.e. Google).  They’re saying that their media presence in the industry will give them an audience of 345 million people.  Since advertisers are known to inflate their numbers to those POTENTIALLY viewing ads instead of those who actually do view the ads, I tend to view these numbers with a bit of incredulity.  They DO have some quality products that, if leveraged correctly, could keep a captive audience for their advertising dollars.  However, the statements they’re making right now and the lack of consideration they seem to be showing towards the average “fun blogger” seems indicative of a mass exodus of non-business users from their blogging platform and possibly a loss of a large chunk of their so-called 345 million pairs of eyes (and future revenues).